Berlin Staatskapelle/Barenboim - review

Indefatigable reserves of energy and immense powers of focus: Daniel Barenboim conducting the Berlin Staatskapelle at Royal Festival Hall, London. Photograph: David Levene

Daniel Barenboim's Bruckner Project with the Berlin Staatskapelle opened last night with the Seventh Symphony paired with Mozart's C Minor Piano Concerto K491. By his own extraordinary standards, the Project itself seems modest, compact and concentrated. Barenboim's indefatigable reserves of energy and immense powers of focus have allowed him, in the past, to play the complete Beethoven sonatas in the space of a fortnight, or to conduct Wagner's major operas on consecutive nights. Performing Bruckner's last three symphonies over five days, with the Seventh and Ninth prefaced by a Mozart concerto directed from the piano, doesn't carry quite the same sense of an epic undertaking, though it would doubtless defeat many lesser musicians.

The opening concert was in many respects magnificent, though the Mozart was less than ideal. Seemingly focused more on his orchestra than himself, Barenboim has played better. In the first movement, there were problems with scope, scale and balance. Blending warmth with detail, the Staatskapelle always sounds good in Mozart, and their opening statement was delivered with restrained grandeur and a fierce sense of drama.

The piano's first entry, however, was strangely low-key in comparison, and what followed felt in places like a curious period of adjustment in which nothing was quite resolved. At climactic moments, and in the approach to the cadenza – his own, and rather moody – Barenboim suddenly let rip with a Beethovian heft that at times seemed inappropriately heavyweight. It surfaced again, momentarily and threateningly, amid the playful variations of the finale, and it was only in the slow movement, beautifully expansive and unsentimental, that Barenboim and his orchestra reached a perfect unity of purpose.

The Bruckner, however, was tremendous. There was neither religiosity, nor sentimentality, nor, perhaps most crucially, that sense of reverential awe on the part of the performers that can prove intrusive in Bruckner performances. Barenboim and the Staatskapelle seem to have this work in their systems, and the overall impression was of music unfolding organically at its own pace rather than of a work being self-consciously interpreted or led. Barenboim's speeds were, in fact, on the fast side, but without any sense of undue pressure, external or internal.

The orchestral sound was clear and sensuous rather than dense or clotted, so the first movement flowed quietly into life, while the Adagio gathered an extraordinary emotional charge as it progressed.

Barenboim seemed very aware of Bruckner's immense debt to Wagner in moments of exquisite harmonic anguish reminiscent of Tristan und Isolde. But we were also reminded that Bruckner could, on occasion, be playful: there was plenty of scampering glee in the Scherzo, while its Trio had something of the grace and poise of a Viennese waltz. I have been sceptical about Bruckner in the past and confess to by and large remaining so. But this was an engrossing experience that served as a chastening reminder of just how vital and thrilling he can be in performance.